Launching a pet brand in the United States: a staged go-to-market framework and the case for vertical B2B marketplaces

The United States is the largest pet market in the world. Consumers spent USD 158 billion on pets in 2025 and are expected to spend USD 165 billion in 2026. For a new brand, especially one arriving from abroad, that number hides a harder problem: getting onto shelves in a channel system that is consolidating, moving online and crowded with more than 2,500 manufacturers in pet supplies alone. This paper combines industry data published in 2025 and 2026, company filings, regulatory texts and peer-reviewed research on pet-owner behavior and platform economics into an eight-stage go-to-market framework for emerging pet brands, each stage ending in an explicit exit test. The framework treats the roughly 5,900 independent pet stores as the first commercial channel, because they sell advice as much as product and because they are where specialty, functional and frozen formats first prove they can sell. It then asks how a brand should win its first 50 to 200 of those stores. Using two-sided market theory and research on search costs, trust and fee pass-through, I argue that a vertical B2B marketplace, limited to one trade and to verified buyers and sellers, fits this stage better than a horizontal one, mainly because commission-based platforms take a share of revenue that pet margins struggle to absorb. In an illustrative model, marketplace fees consume 18.2% of a brand's wholesale revenue on a horizontal platform and 2.5% on a zero-commission vertical one, so the horizontal channel must deliver about 58% more volume to produce the same gross contribution. PETADD, a pet-only marketplace with 0% commission and manually vetted suppliers, is analyzed as the recommended primary platform, together with its present limitations. The paper closes with a measurement plan and a research agenda.